Monday, June 4, 2012

The born-again sysadmin

A few weeks ago, I decided to go back to my roots as a systems administrator. While being an architect was a fulfilling experience, I was missing a lot the technical work I used to do in my previous career.

So, I'll be transitioning from my current architecture duties to join a team in charge of a mission critical system that currently runs on - hold your breath - Tru64 Unix. This is a major real-time system for my company, which spans three sites and counts a plethora of servers. Can't say more due to security issues. Many in that team are due to leave for retirement this summer so I'll probably work as a Mr Wolf for a while, fixing what needs to be fixed (and strategically avoiding what doesn't need to).

This Tru64 system is planned to be upgraded to Linux (specifically RHEL 5.8) starting next year, with a go live in 2014. And I'm in the delightful situation of having been one of the architects to document that upgrade -- the difference being that it's ME who will have to live with it for years to come.

I'll be the first to admit that this blog has been slow going between 2010 and 2012. There was simply no content that was "generic" enough to be published here. Things might change over time.


Monday, April 16, 2012

The Microsoft SMTP service doesn't create a log file.

The Microsoft SMTP service doesn't log anything in the SmtpSvc1 directory even though you enabled logging and you're on Windows 2003?

Save yourself some trouble, and install the "ODBC Logging" role service in Server Manager. Although it shouldn't help, it does, and for me the SMTP service started logging automagically after restarting it.

Wasted an hour on that nonsense before finding this trick buried deep somewhere in a forum posting.